Hungary's Heart(land)

On the trail to Fuzer castle.

Every country has a landscape that shapes its mythology. The beating heart of the nation. For Canada, it's the North. The Americans have the West. Hungarians have Hortobagy, our first stop on a road trip with Kata's parents into Hungary's east.

Poets have waxed, well, poetic, about it. It's vast and bare, hot and dry. There are few places to hide from the sun. Wildfires flare up in the summer heat. Sandor Petofi called it the Burning Fields.

Driving into the Hortobagy is like driving into a time capsule. The barns have thatched roofs, with carefully grounded lightning rods to avoid fire. Water is brought up from wells with wooden levers, visible from far off. And some even wear traditional costume.

Driving through it, you notice the landscape itself. The shades of brown that stretch almost as far as the eye can see until the plains turn into hills in the hazy distance. The sunflowers weighed down by the seeds, and the fields of swaying wheat. If you're counting horses through the heat shimmer, you lose count.

But we were only passing through the Burning Fields. We stopped briefly in the town of Hortobagy – long enough to buy a handmade straw hat at the old farmers' market and see the famous Nine Hole Bridge. Then onto the road we went...

The Nine Hole Bridge of Hortobagy. 

Debrecen

For my entire stint in Hungary, the only thing I knew about Debrecen was that they made delicious, spicy sausages there. It wasn't until this trip that I learned its other big export is Resistance.

For some reason, the Reformation ideas resonated with the people of Debrecen, and the city wholeheartedly latched onto the Calvinism in the 1500s. Its university produced Calvinist scholars who traveled all over Europe, spreading the good word of the Reformation and giving the city its nickname: 'The Geneva of Hungary."

Calvinism was huge in Switzerland, but the rest of its followers were scattered in small pockets all over Europe. Debrecen was on the edge of the Roman Catholic/Protestant world – to the south was the Muslim Ottoman Empire and further east was Orthodox Russia. For Calvinism to take hold and become its springboard in the region says something about its people's dedication.

Debrecen University's pretty library.

We visited the Debrecen's university. Aside from a nice museum about medieval life and a beautiful library with artifacts from the university's most famous graduates, they have an old lecture hall. This is no ordinary lecture hall. It was here, in 1848, the Hungarian National Assembly declared independence. Kossuth Lajos would later read the proclamation from the steps of the nearby Great Reformed Church to a cheering crowd.

The lecture hall has a new coat of paint, but mostly it is as it was then. Assembly members would have sat in the same wooden pews. There was a raised pulpit up front, where Kossuth would have read the declaration.

To reach the library and the lecture hall, you climb a flight of ancient, thick wooden stairs. They're worn smooth, but still sturdy enough that they don't give way or groan under someone's weight – quality oak from the forests we'd be hiking the next day. As we climbed the stairs, Kata said, "These are original! Can you believe that Petofi Sandor and Kossuth Lajos walked on these same stairs?" We were walking in the footsteps of Hungary's heroes.

The Great Reformed Church in Debrecen.

Füzer

Our final destination was a hunting lodge in Füzer, a region of sloping, forested mountains close to the Slovak border.

After a good night's sleep – the lodge's bar closed early – we struck out on the planned 23km hike. The route would take us up several mountains, through scenic woodland, past the great castle of Füzer.

Hungarian castles are not Cinderella castles. Most have seen action. Many were built to resist another Mongol invasion after the nearly apocalyptic first Mongol invasion in 1241. The Mongols defeated the Hungarian army and destroyed the capital, pillaged the countryside, ravaged the population, and destroyed every city or town that wasn't protected by a stone fortress.

Anticipating a second invasion, the Hungarians set to work building stone castles that couldn't be breached by a horde of Mongol horsemen. They might pillage and burn the countryside, but they couldn't stay long with a garrison of troops in a castle that could attack them from the rear.

The strategy worked against the second Mongol invasion. With all the food stored in the vaults of the impregnable castles, the Mongols starved. Facing guerrilla attacks from the castle's garrisons, they fled in disarray.

Most those Hungarian castles couldn't resist the gigantic siege cannons the Ottoman Turks dragged with them through the Balkans. One after another, castle after castle fell to the Turks as they marched into Hungary, driving towards Vienna.

Füzer held out against the Turks, along with a handful of others like Eger, and have passed into national myth. But it was the Austrians who destroyed it. Getting tired of putting down Hungarian revolutions, they planted explosives in every castle, demolishing them to leave no stronghold behind for Hungarian rebels.

It is a not-so heroic end for castles that stood against so much, so I understand the government's recent desire to rebuild the castles. I also understand the romantic desire to leave the ruins behind as a more somber reminder of the past. But I have to say, there is something raw and awe-inspiring about visiting a castle ruin in Hungary.

Fuzer castle has been carefully restored,
 right down to the toilets.

Füzer was one of the rebuilt castles chosen, and they've done a lovely job of it. The chapel, living quarters, a disconcertingly large amount of toilets, four storage vaults – for wine, beer,  bacon, and then everything else – among other rooms are carefully restored.

Füzer was a short stop at the hike. Much of the day was spent humping mountains and going off the beaten path in the forests beyond Füzer.

The trail skirted the border between Hungary and Slovakia, a silly border that is just shy of a hundred years old – very young in mountain and forest years. As we hiked along the path, we flitted from Hungary to Slovakia and back again as lumberjacks and hunters must have done for centuries before the Allies plopped a border there in 1920.

We also stopped at the Hungarian Language Museum.
I looked at the pictures there.

Tokaj

After an evening of sleep and recovery from the hike – despite staying up later, since we ordered extra beer before the hotel bar closed – we stopped at Tokaj, one of Hungary's top-notch wine growing regions.

The Romantic English poets, like Byron, loved this region's wine. Louis XIV declared it, "the King of Wines and the Wine of Kings." For centuries, it was one of Europe's favourite wines. Today, after being held behind an Iron Curtain for two generations, wine from Tokaj is rightfully getting its reputation back.

And yet, despite a great visit to a wine cellar, where we sampled three varying grades wine from dry to semi-sweet to sweet, and then a final a dry, furmint version, the only photo I took was of this public toilet. A toilet Kata designed as a young industrial design student.

Still, I recommend visiting Tokaj for the fine wine, and the finely designed public toilets.

The proud designer and her public toilet.